Posted in: Batman, Comics, DC Comics | Tagged: dc comics, Death Metal, james tynion iv

DC Planned For Every Comic To Tie In With Death Metal For Two Months

Published Thu, 09 Sep 2021 13:28:12 -0500

Okay, okay, just one more DC Comics insider reveal from James Tynion IV's Empire Of The Tiny Onion Substack newsletter look back at his time on Batman, with all of the politics, competing publishing drives, and writing by the seat of his pants. We already looked at his creation of a new Joker for 5G, how he eventually became Punchline, as well as the original development of Peacekeeper-01. Which should be enough, leaving plenty of other revelations for the newsletter. But dammit, I couldn't let this one go. Because long before Future State happened, Bleeding Cool reported rumours about a two-month gap, similar to Convergence. And eventually we got Future State. But that wasn't the original plan. We reported;

Bleeding Cool heard at MCM London Comic Con from rather well-connected folk that DC Comics may be doing something similar to Convergence. You may recall you heard about that at Bleeding Cool first too when we referred to it as the DC Band-Aid – though we also were the first to tell you what it was actually called as well. Two months where regular comic book stories are halted, to tell a cross-continuity story affecting all books. At the time, it was in aid of DC Comics moving from New York to Burbank, and editor Marie Javins was brought into the company to take on putting out all eighty-nine-or-so books that made up the event, often including lesser well-known creators to DC Comics. Getting them all out of the door, giving the rest of DC editorial a chance to move properly, saw her promoted within the group to her current position as Group Editor of the Justice League books. Well, it's happening again. But rather than covering a more from once coast to the other it will be there to get DC Comics timeliness back on track. When books are not late right now, they are squeakily close to being so. And so you get issues like Superman and Supergirl featuring characters of the wrong ethnic background. Batpenises on display. And all manner of stuff getting sneaked through, unapproved. Giving all teams a two-month gap to get ahead and up to speed might be what everyone needs. To start preparing for 5G in 2021 (or sooner). And it seems that, once again Marie Javins will be the one tasked with delivering the new DC Band-Aid.

Well, in the newsletter, James Tynion IV writes;

At the time, there was discussion of there being a two month line-wide tie-in to the Death Metal event in June and July, and the hope was that after that gap, we might be able to shift into the originally promised monthly schedule. So, I put together a very hopeful (read: naïve) breakdown of how I might refocus that initial breakdown into something that would consolidate the run into a few coherent parts to be tackled by different artists. At this point I wasn't willing to accept that my first arc was going to have rotating artists. I wanted to do what I could to make every art change have a story purpose.

Some titles tied into Death Metal during that event back in 2020, but it seems the original plan was for every DC Comics title to tie into Death Metal, which remade the DC Universe as a dark fantasy version of itself, for two months with new creative teams covering that time. And yes, at the time, Batman was on a twice monthly schedule. The plan was for Batman to go monthly again. It didn't happen, 5G was reworked into a Future State event in 2021 instead, and Tynion talks about that in his subscriber-only newsletter as well…

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